The Yahoo News/Huffington Post/Slate Democratic candidate mash-up, essentially an online debate that you control, is live. Charlie Rose interviewed all eight Democratic candidates yesterday on 3 topics: Iraq, healthcare and education and spends more than 6 minutes per candidate on each topic. You can pick your candidates, pick the issue and watch their responses back to back. In addition, each candidate gets to respond to a question by Bill Maher: Barack Obama on the Ten Commandments, Hillary Clinton on her decision to give Bush the authorization to go to war, Edwards on the impact of cows on CO2 levels in the atmosphere, etc.

Although not technically a debate, this is one of the best forums we've had to hear the views of the candidates if only because each candidate is allowed to delve more deeply than normal into each of only 3 topics. It's also refreshing to see the "lower tier" candidates given as much time as the front-runners so they can actually be heard for a change. What's missing, of course, is the opportunity for candidates to clash head-to-head but that hardly happens during the normal debates anyway.

There's also a wholly unscientific candidate poll, which currently shows Obama ahead with 37%, Clinton at 31% and Edwards at 12%. This is surprising, not that Obama is so strong, he shines with this format, but that Clinton does so well and Edwards doesn't.

John Dickerson at Slate takes a look at some of the candidates' responses. I agree with him that Maher's question to Clinton was the best:

"Sen. Clinton, all the senators here, except Sen. Obama, voted for the Iraq resolution in 2002, saying that their decision was based on intelligence that they believed to be accurate at the time. In other words, George Bush fooled you. Why should Americans vote for someone who can be fooled by George Bush?"

Clinton's answer, as Dickerson says, is her usual defense of her vote and criticism of the way the war was waged and, while perhaps not satisfying, demonstrates pretty clearly how the most hawkish of the candidates has been able to sell herself to the Democratic base as a dove.

mashup (wikipedia) - A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

The image below will take you to the ultimate John Edwards MASHUP. BUT, before you click on the image go below the fold for some more information.

*Update:* Google maps only allows 110 items per page, so I have three pages, click through to all three. LOTS of INFO on this map.

If anyone is interested, you can see clips from YearlyKos here: http://www.linktv.org/yearlykos/